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On warm night in 1993 I “discovered” kinkajous in a balsa tree, actually Greg Adler showed them to me, but this led to a long history of cool discoveries worth highlighting on this #SmallDiscoverySunday (1/n) #thread
Kinkajous mostly eat fruit, but Dec/Jan in Panama not many species have ripe fruit– Balsa to the rescue, they have giant flowers that produce sweet nectar. When Holly Menino @NatGeoMag wanted a story on kinkajous I suggested their photog, Mattias Klum, visit during Balsa season
In 2015 we GPS tracked a kinkajou caught in that same balsa, here you can see her full range and how important that balsa tree was (far right of map). This also shows potential pollination distances for kinkajous. @MovebankTeam #SmallDiscoverySunday
They had a great slo-mo camera and also created a fake flower to get this amazing inside view of the kinkajou’s amazing tongue. Luckily, the kinkajous were cooperative.
. @zieglerphoto1 and @NatGeoMag created this crazy counterbalanced boom pole operation they could use to get the cameras out into the tree canopy to get the amazing up-close pictures.
The 'Cantina Balsa' ended up being kind of like an African watering hole, attacking both predators and prey
By climbing up nearby trees Mattias was able to clearly show the pollen kinks get on their faces, this is why balsa makes all that nectar, to lure mammals in to act as pollinators. #SmallDiscoverySunday
I was able to catch her in 2003 and look at her teeth wear, compared to others I’ve seen, I would have called this 8 year old a young adult. In zoos kinks can live to 40, I’m now sure I’ve seen 20+ year olds in the wild #SmallDiscoverySunday.
Lotus is now the logo for my podcast: Wild Animals: crazy stories about animals, told by the people who study them. https://naturalsciences.org/research-collections/wild-animals-podcast @naturalsciences
We celebrated the end of that project with another small discovery – you can drink Champaign out of a balsa flower (although my tongue is too small to do it efficiently). #SmallDiscoverySunday
The lead shot was an animal I caught as a juvenile with the help of @pupating in 1994. We named her Lotus and gave her a small notch in her ear, clearly visible in the 2002 photograph in the same tree.
